DR. JOSEPH SHRAND: Finding strength in each other after Newtown

Friday

Jan 4, 2013 at 12:01 AMJan 4, 2013 at 4:08 AM

Ultimately, we all must live with the uncertainty of never truly knowing why or how such an atrocity like the Newtown shootings could happen. But in our shared experience of uncertainty, we can find the ability to tolerate the unknown. Being with others who can share in this uncertainty and not go limbic is the antidote to being powerless.

Human beings have a hard time tolerating uncertainty. It makes us nervous, not knowing something. Knowledge is power, and not knowing makes us feel powerless. To defend against this most difficult of feelings, we make things up.

We make up theories in the wake of something as incomprehensible as the shootings in Newtown. We postulate that the killer had to be crazy. He had to have something terribly, terribly wrong with him to be able to execute such an atrocity. No sane person could be such a cold-blooded killer.

Murder without apparent motive is difficult to fathom, and murder of children is even more intolerable. How do we understand why or how a person could walk into a school and start shooting? With the killer dead, who do we now hold accountable? What do we do to protect ourselves and our children? And from whom are we meant to protect them?

Our desperation and anxiety are clear in our responses: protect ourselves with guns in the schools. Put police in the schools. Be more vigilant of those with “mental illness.”

To make sense of something this senseless, we try to assign a psychiatric diagnosis, a condition, to explain how a person’s brain could so misfire. To tolerate the grief of Sandy Hook, we turn not just to God, but also to science. We look to psychiatry, neurology, biology, for some way to explain the inexplicable. We look in desperation for a “diagnosis.”

A diagnosis is a convenient label to explain a constellation of symptoms. Some of these labels are already being bandied about in an attempt to give a name to the unspeakable. While finding a “diagnosis” for the shooter may ease some of our distress, it runs the risk of vilifying others that “carry” the same diagnosis.

Sharing a label does not make us identical. Being thrust into the “group with mental illness” does not make each member of that group a threat to public safety.

The vast majority of those who have a psychiatric condition would no more consider doing what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School than you or I. We cannot even say for certain if the shooter had an accurate diagnosis, but even if he did, we will find no calming power in assigning the same qualities of one person to other members who have the same label.

The primitive part of our brain, unable to make sense of such an irrational act, wants to blame. We must resist that impulse by continuing to use our rational brain to regain control. This control can calm the sense of powerlessness against which we struggle.

Safety is being part of a group, and the larger the group, the safer each of us can be. For the safety of myself, I must help my neighbors feel safe themselves. Of this we can be certain. Intuitively, people around the world have come to this conclusion.

Even as they struggle to make sense of the senseless, they have come together, held vigils, and sent food, comfort, and support to those in need. As a global community, we have extended our arms to wrap some symbolic semblance of comfort around those who may not know comfort for many, many years.

We have felt a need to do something, and that something is reminding each of us that in this world are people who care; that there are more people who care than those who do not. And that in this knowledge is true power, true understanding, and true comfort.

We will never “get over” this loss, but as a group, at some time in the future, we will have to come to terms with it. We will have to find a place for it in who we are and where we are headed.

Newtown has become part of the fabric of humanity that makes us up, but it need not define us. The definition of who we are will be in how we come together to help each other without blame or prejudice, or irrational, impulsive “solutions” just to ease our uncertainty. The certainty of shared values binds us together, of this I am certain.

And this certainty is what we need to advance when ready to come to terms with Newtown. Ultimately, we all must live with the uncertainty of never truly knowing why or how such an atrocity could happen. But in our shared experience of uncertainty, we can find the ability to tolerate the unknown. Being with others who can share in this uncertainty and not go limbic is the antidote to being powerless.

We are a global community, and as such we are not powerless. Not now. Not ever.

Dr. Joseph Shrand is an instructor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and the medical director of CASTLE, a division of High Point Treatment Center in Brockton. He is triple board-certified in adult psychiatry, child and adolescent psychiatry, and a diplomate of the American Board of Addiction Medicine.

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